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Strawberry Sponge
Pick the stems from one quart of strawberries, mash and mix one teacupful of powdered sugar with them. Put one teacupful of crushed loaf-sugar in a saucepan with one-half pint of water and boil it gently for twenty minutes, then mix with it one ounce of gelatine that has been soaked for two hours in a teacupful of water, and remove it from the fire at once, Pass the strawberries through a fine hair-sieve and mix them with the syrup. Stand the bowl containing the above mixture on ice, and beat it for five minutes, then add the whipped whites of four eggs and continue beating until the mixture begins to thicken. Turn the sponge out of the moulds onto fancy dishes, dust a little powdered sugar on the top, pour a little whipped cream round, and serve.
A late-nineteenth-century gelatine "sponge" from the Waldorf's own kitchen. The technique is sound in outline, but one step puts it outside what a modern kitchen can serve, and several of its measures need translating.
- Why this one failsFour egg whites are whipped raw and folded into a mixture that has already been chilled on ice; nothing in the finished dessert is ever heated. Uncooked whites carry a real Salmonella risk, and the sponge is then held cold and eaten cold, so no later step reduces it. Use a current recipe for a strawberry mousse or sponge, one built on a cooked meringue or pasteurised whites.
- The syrup does not cook the eggsThe sugar syrup is boiled, but the gelatine is stirred in and the pan taken straight off the heat, and the whole mixture is then beaten over ice for five minutes before the whites go in. By that point the base is cold. This is not an Italian-meringue method, whatever the boiling step suggests.
- TeacupfulNot a standardised measure; in American books of this period a teacupful is variously taken as between four and six fluid ounces, smaller than the breakfast cup and not interchangeable with it.
- Loaf-sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones or blocks, broken and crushed at home. Granulated sugar is the direct substitute by weight; "powdered" here means what would now be called caster or superfine, not modern icing sugar with its cornstarch.
- GelatineAn ounce of the gelatine sold in 1900 is not equivalent to an ounce of a modern powdered brand; bloom strengths were neither standardised nor printed on the package. The two-hour soak belongs to the older product; modern powder blooms in five to ten minutes.
- Hair-sieveA fine sieve strung with horsehair, usually said to have been preferred for acidic fruit because it did not react with it. Any fine-mesh nylon or stainless sieve does the same work; the point is to remove the strawberry seeds.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of strawberries is about a pound and a half whole, somewhat less once hulled. The recipe refers to moulds in the plural, apparently individual ones, and gives no chilling time, which would have run to some hours in an ice chest — one of several places where the writing takes the Waldorf's kitchen staff for granted.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a vast compilation that ranges from hotel-scale set pieces to plain household cookery. A "sponge" in this period meant a specific class of dessert: a gelatine jelly whipped while setting until it took in air and turned pale and foamy, usually lightened further with beaten egg white, and set in moulds. It sat between the older wine and fruit jellies and the cream-based Bavarians and mousses that displaced it. Recipes like this one depended on chilling and on strawberries in quantity at their brief season.